Chocolate chunks, caramel and sea salt take these cookies to another level

There are few scenarios or situations that aren’t made better by a batch of freshly baked cookies. Of the thousands of biscuit varieties, it is hard to beat a decent cookie, and while there are countless cookie flavour combinations, you can’t go wrong with a classic chocolate chip. It is a familiar favourite, and one that has a certain nostalgia in every bite. This caramel sea salt chocolate chunk cookie recipe is a level up, and a personal favourite.

The flavours of caramel, sea salt and chocolate are all combined into a single sweet treat. What I love about this combination of flavours, is that it satisfies several cravings; saltiness from the sea salt, a slight bitterness from the dark chocolate, sweetness from a rich caramel, with that nostalgic cookie dough flavour and a varied texture throughout.

A good cookie to me should have crunchy edges with a soft and slightly chewy centre. The trick to this is to slightly underbake your cookies, as they will continue to cook from the residual heat on the baking sheet once removed from the oven.

I have tried and tested several ways to inject the caramel element into my cookies - by stuffing the ball of dough with a chocolate covered caramel, or by breaking a set caramel into shards and peppering it throughout the dough. The method I prefer however, is adding homemade caramel sauce straight into the dough. The result is a beautifully deep caramel coloured cookie, with a richness from the caramel sauce, and a balanced salty sweetness.

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The caramel sauce is best made a day, or a few hours, before you want to bake your dough. The recipe given here will leave you with about a half a jam jar of sauce left over. It seems a shame to make a smaller quantity; the leftover sauce can be kept at room temperature and used to drizzle over pancakes, desserts or ice-cream, or as a filling for cakes.

Note these are not chocolate chip cookies but chocolate chunk cookies. I chop my chocolate by hand and use whole bars rather than using chocolate drops, as I find many supermarket brands of chocolate drops to be of a lower quality. Another advantage to this is that you get various sized shards of chocolate speckled throughout your cookie, creating beautiful melting pockets of chocolate in cookies just warm from the oven.

Recipe: Caramel Sea Salt Chocolate Chunk Cookies